The Oracle Who Remembered Too Much

Morning mist rolled through our clearing like fingers searching for something lost. I woke to find Aria already awake, cradling Ashara with that particular stillness that meant something was wrong. The exhaustion from our daughter's proximity to old magic had left her sleeping deeper than usual, but that wasn't what held Aria's attention.

"Look," she whispered, tilting Ashara so I could see her tiny foot.

A mark spiraled there—not carved, not burned, just there. Like a memory pressed into flesh. It wasn't a glyph of power or a sign of possession. It looked older than that. Patient.

Aria's finger hovered over it, trembling. When she finally touched the mark, her whole body went rigid. Her lips moved, shaping words in a voice that wasn't hers:

"Some names remember being spoken, even when no mouth survives."

The words hung in the air like smoke from a fire that had never been lit. Ashara whimpered in her sleep, but the mark remained. If anything, it seemed clearer now, as if acknowledgment had given it strength.

"That's not a threat," Aria said slowly, coming back to herself. "It's a warning. From something older than the gods we've been fighting."

I studied the spiral, remembering stories my grandmother had whispered about marks that appeared when the world was trying to remember something it had been forced to forget. "I know someone who might help. Nima of the Hollow Bones. An oracle who speaks only in erased futures."

"Erased?"

"Things that were meant to happen but didn't. Prophecies that got swallowed. She vanished decades ago, but I think I know where."

The journey took us through lands that felt sick with wrongness. Crows fell from the sky mid-flight, their bodies hitting the ground with wet thuds. Our footsteps made no echo, as if sound itself was being eaten before it could travel. Ashara stayed unnaturally quiet, her silver eyes tracking things we couldn't see.

The Orchard of Hollow Bones appeared through fog like a wound in the world. Dead trees stood in perfect rows, their branches heavy with totems made from teeth and owl feathers, dreamcatchers woven from sinew and sorrow. The ground gave slightly under our feet—not mud, but something that felt disturbingly like skin stretched over slow breathing.

Nima sat at the orchard's heart, so still she might have been another tree. Age had moved past her into something else—not old but outside of time's reach. Where her eyes should have been, moss grew thick and green, but she turned toward us with perfect accuracy.

"You've come to hear what you tried to forget," she said, voice like wind through empty skulls.

"We need to know what's still inside her," Aria said, holding Ashara tighter. "What still listens through her."

Nima's smile revealed teeth like broken moonlight. "Then you'll need to listen too. Not forward. But back. Time runs both ways for things that were never properly born."

She moved with disturbing grace, gathering items from the grotesque garden around her. A cracked skull became a brazier. Into it went moon-blood—how she had it, I didn't want to know—dust that smelled of ruined temples, and a lock of Aria's hair cut with a blade of polished bone.

"Lie in the circle," Nima instructed, gesturing to bones arranged in reverse of any protection ritual I knew. "Hold the child. Let what was erased speak through what survived."

Aria looked at me, and I saw my own fear reflected there. But beneath it, the steel that had carried her through gods and mirrors and births that tried to unmake her. She stepped into the circle, our daughter pressed against her heart.

The smoke rose, sweet and wrong. Aria's eyes fluttered closed, and I watched helplessly as both mother and child went somewhere I couldn't follow.

In the circle, Aria's body tensed. Her lips moved, shaping words I couldn't hear. Ashara's tiny hands clenched and unclenched, grasping at invisible threads. The spiral on her foot began to glow—not with light but with absence, as if it were a hole through which something watched.

Minutes passed like hours. The totems swayed without wind. The ground's breathing grew labored. Then Aria gasped, eyes flying open, and I saw she'd been crying. Not from pain—from recognition.

"A field," she whispered. "Full of mothers who carried gods that never made it to birth. They weren't vessels. They were graves." Her voice broke. "And Ashara walked through them, leaving glyphs with every step. There was something behind a veil. A baby with no face, reaching for me."

"Did you touch it?"

"No." She looked down at Ashara, whose spiral mark had vanished. But something else had changed. "Check her shadow."

I looked, and my blood chilled. Ashara's shadow fell normally—but it moved a heartbeat after she did. Not much, barely noticeable. But enough to show that something was out of sync.

"She's not a god," Nima said, rising with that eerie grace. "She's a breach. A kindness-shaped door. And something still knocks from the other side of being."

"How do we close it?" I demanded.

Nima's moss-covered face turned toward me, and her smile was terrible in its gentleness. "You don't. You teach her to answer wisely. To choose what comes through. Because something will. Something always does when a child is born between states."

The ground shuddered. From beneath the orchard came a sound—not quite howling, not quite singing. The totems shook violently, teeth chattering in their grotesque arrangements. The air thinned, and suddenly I could see through things, past the present into moments that might be.

Aria flickered. One moment she stood beside me. The next, I saw her aged and alone, silver-haired and scarred. Then dead, cradling a child who'd grown too large for human arms. Then monstrous, wearing a crown of other mothers' bones. All versions existing at once, time collapsed into terrible possibility.

"Run," Nima said pleasantly. "The orchard is remembering what it's for."

We fled as the ground began to fold inward, trees falling not down but through, disappearing into spaces that shouldn't exist. Behind us, Nima's laughter followed, rich with the joy of someone who'd found the punchline to a joke told before words were invented.

We didn't stop until the wrongness faded, until our footsteps made sound again and birds flew without falling. Only then did we pause, gasping, checking that we were all still real and present and singular.

"Her shadow," Aria said, looking at Ashara with exhausted worry. "It's still wrong."

I watched our daughter reach for something only she could see, her movement preceding her shadow by that terrible heartbeat. Whatever had been erased was trying to catch up. Whatever had never been born was learning to move through her.

"We'll figure it out," I said, with more confidence than I felt.

But as we walked on, I couldn't shake Nima's words. A breach. A door. And somewhere, in the space between Ashara's body and shadow, something patient knocked.

Waiting to be let through.

Waiting to finish being born.